


Revelation

by kinosternon



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical swearing, Drama, F/F, Hopefully canon-compliant, Romance, Temporary Character Death, backstory speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-05
Packaged: 2018-09-15 02:45:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9215339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinosternon/pseuds/kinosternon
Summary: The ramifications of Kima's and Allura's first encounter with Thordak go beyond what either of them imagined.(Winter's Crest exchange gift for JanaRumpandRCJawnn.)





	1. Kima

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JanaRumpandRCJawnn (JanaRumpandRCJawwn)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JanaRumpandRCJawwn/gifts).



> Original prompt, Kima/Allura: "Something when they were younger, perhaps when they first fought Thordak, or how they met."

Kima was, technically at least, a holy woman. As such, she’d been subject to many lectures on spirituality in her day. They varied a great deal based on one’s patron deity, of course, but there were some factors that remained more or less constant. The role of clarity, for instance, or of insight. Such things were seldom easy to obtain, and she’d been told often enough in her youth that she had to be patient, and bend herself to meditation and long periods of self-reflection to gain them.

Sometimes, instead, clarity could arrive with all the subtlety of a maul to the head. True, insights of that sort were seldom of the uplifting variety, but they were usually more Kima’s style.

One revelation that was hitting her over the head, scant minutes into their attack, was that her fighting force, hired army and all, was thoroughly outclassed by this particular dragon. 

Thordak’s first attack had taken out a fifth of their hired forces, simply because that was how many were standing in his way.

Just because the insight had appeared, however, didn’t mean she had to accept it. She fought it viciously as the fight continued, focusing on the lizardfolk making it impossible to concentrate their firepower on their main target. After all, they had little choice; if they let Thordak get away now, things could only get worse. They had to end this by any means necessary.

At least, that had been what Kima had thought, as four-fifths of their force continued their slow slaughter of the lizardfolk army, as their rogue played a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with a being twenty times his size, as Drake experimented with spell after spell flung into the dragon’s teeth. She couldn’t judge much, from the distance she was from that part of the fray, but it didn’t look like the attacks were landing right. That was another sign.

Then Thordak did it _again,_ a bare few minutes later, right into the middle of their mercenary force—a blast of fiery breath that extended for an impossible distance. Kima, who’d just struck a finishing blow on to the last lizardman within her melée range, turned to follow the arc of flame as it continued, past the wide, rocky clearing at the cavern’s mouth and into the forest that surrounded it. A dozen trees snapped like twigs, and plumes of smoke and sparks rose into the sky.

Dozens, lizardfolk, human, elf, and others alike, fell to the blow. Some were incinerated entirely by Thordak’s breath, buffeted away by the wind. Most fell in a heap of charred limbs, dead or unconscious, or at the very least unable to keep fighting. Screams rose from the swathe of destruction the red dragon had left in his wake.

Out of all of the carnage, even charred and smoking, Kima still recognized Allura’s body as it fell.

She crossed the path of perhaps a dozen lizardfolk as she ran to her, and some of them had the presence of mind to take a swipe at her as she went. A few missed entirely; most glanced off her armor, just as harmless as if they _had_ missed; a few hit her, but they didn’t even slow her down. She heard snatches, every now and then, of other voices on the battlefield, screams and shouts and panicked calls to regroup, but all was drowned out by the silence and the stillness from the burned-out husk she could barely see against the charred ground of the battlefield.

Anyone even remotely conscious would be writhing in agony, with burns like those, but Kima could see no sign of movement. She screamed for Allura at the top of her lungs, hoping against hope for some kind of response. Amid the cacaphony of battle—or maybe just the tumult of her own panic—she couldn’t hear her own voice, even though she felt her throat tearing itself raw. She ran endlessly to her fallen friend, and cursed her fucking useless halfling legs, she just wasn’t _fast_ enough…

Still, there was no way she was giving up. As she ran, one hand left her maul to go to the pouch she carried on her belt in case of emergencies. It was right where she always kept it, and she grimly reviewed the steps for the spell she needed as she ran.

She had one minute. On the battlefield, a minute felt like eternity, but she couldn’t trust that feeling. For all she could tell, half of it had already gone, and the spell wasn’t instantaneous to cast, either. At least a few seconds, with no distractions…

She took her hand away from the pouch again, tightening both hands on her maul. A few seconds was all she had to spare on the lowlifes that had begun to swarm around Allura’s body. It was already more than she could afford.

Luckily, the lizardfolk were useless, and most of them had already moved on for the hapless remnants of their mercenary army. Kima took out the stragglers with a few powerful swings of her maul, and then let it drop to her side as she turned Allura over, scrabbling for the diamonds at her belt.

The ritual was a blur of checking and double-checking the steps, saying the words with lips that trembled, trying not to think about what was at stake even as she fought with all her might to hold onto the last few strands of life slipping invisibly from Allura’s form…

 _Come back to me, Allie_ , she thought as she chanted, pouring every bit of her spirit and will into the spell, commanding her back. _Please_.

Allura’s limp form lifted from the ground as the ritual drew to completion, and she was enveloped in a light that seemed impossibly bright and pure against the smoky sky. Then she fell back into Kima’s waiting arms, still and far too cold. Kima glanced around, cautious, but across the battlefield, Thordak had just spit fire again, wiping out more of their troops. It seemed that for now, at least, the ritual had passed more or less unnoticed.

The spell had healed the worst of Allura’s bodily injuries, but she was still streaked with blood and ash. Her hair, half-unbound from its carefully wound plait, was smooth and cold under Kima’s fingers. She was in a state of disarray Kima had only ever seen after weeks in a dungeon, by which point she was unusually grumpy and out of sorts. Nevertheless, as she waited for any sign of life, it occurred to Kima all over again how beautiful Allura was. It was something she’d always known, objectively, but this particular truth was something different. She felt this revelation more keenly, in that moment, than she would have felt an arrow through her heart.

Cradling Allura’s head in her hands, Kima touched their foreheads together and prayed. 

_Please._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (According to the D&D Reddit, Paladins gain access to Revivify at level 9. For the sake of this story, I'm assuming that's accurate.)


	2. Allura

When Allura first woke on the battlefield, she wondered for a moment if she’d somehow ended up in the Abyss. The sky overhead was a sickly orange, and as she took her first breath she found herself choking on smoke. Her body was suffused with a sick heat, like a fever sunk deep into her bones, and her skin crackled like she'd been in direct sunlight for hours on end.

Then she saw Kima bent over her, smudged with soot and splattered with blood, tear tracks making the only clean lines on her face, and realized where she was and how badly everything had gone wrong.

Kima hauled her to her feet, making up for poor leverage with sheer brute force. Allura, bits of her clothes still smoldering, freshly repaired body in such pain it was difficult to think straight, stumbled blindly after her.

They ran for longer than Allura, in her current state, could process; it was only as she began to struggle to keep up with Kima’s unflagging endurance that it dawned on her exactly what the running meant. 

“The others?” she rasped out.

“Retreating,” Kima said grimly, “if they know what’s good for them. We can’t risk a proper rendezvous—if the beast follows us, he’d wipe us all out for good. The army’s scattered in all directions. Drake’s working on directing them now.” She hesitates, glancing over her shoulder, and adds quietly, “It was touch-and-go for a little while there, but all of our friends are fine.”

They continued into the foothills of the mountains, Kima keeping them close to the treeline as she scouted for shelter. All Allura could do was defer to her superior knowledge of the wild, and reflect on how many they must have lost.

Eventually, Kima found a cave she thought would pass muster for the night. After leaving briefly to check its safety, she came back for Allura and led her inside. Barely a crack on the face of a stone mountainside, the crack opened up a few dozen feet in, the ceiling high enough that Allura couldn’t quite see where it ended.

“Should be safe to make a fire,” Kima said, pulling out her flint and tinder. “Hand me the bedrolls, will you? I’ll set up.”

Obediently, Allura reached into her bag of holding and pulled out the bulkiest of their camping supplies, handing them over to Kima. She tried to help, at first, but Kima pressed her into the wall, eyes fierce, and snapped, “You _rest_ ,” and Allura hadn’t really had any ground to argue.

Kima didn’t let her help with anything. Over the next few hours, she tended the fire, laid out their bedrolls, prepared a basic meal out of field rations, and served Allura, all without saying a word. They ate in stony silence.

Allura, lost in thoughts of her own, hardly noticed. Kima had saved her, but there were so many others that hadn’t been saved. Indeed, it was possible that her very survival had come at the cost of lives that might not have been lost if Kima had kept fighting, not to mention the many that she herself might have saved if she hadn’t been incapacitated…

Allura felt every single one of those lives as an extra weight on her shoulders, as a vise around her ribs, slowly crushing inward. It made it hard to keep running, knowing the failure they were leaving behind them, but she could think of nothing else to do, nothing to try.

As though echoing her thoughts, Kima spoke, staring into the fire. “…We can’t kill that thing.”

“What?” she asked, surprised. Even if it was what she’d been thinking, she hadn’t expected to hear it from Kima as well.

“We can’t kill it,” Kima repeated, growling. “This is well beyond our pay grade, and we’ve already gotten enough good people killed. We can’t try something like this again.”

“But…you’re right, of course,” Allura interrupted herself hurriedly as Kima glared over at her, “but someone has to do _something_. Thordak’s been moving north. If someone doesn’t stop him, who knows how far he could stretch? He could take over the whole continent. He could lay waste to Syngorn and Emon, and then turn his sights even further afield.” Allura shivered. “We can’t leave him alone. There’s no telling what he’ll do.”

“Well, this time we had a plan,” Kima said, acerbic. “We had an _army_. We knew where Thordak was based, and we were able to pin him so he couldn’t fly—and we were _wiped out_. We lost more than a third of our army. Half of our party almost got killed, and we do this for a living! _You_ —”

Something glinted on her face, and she rubbed at her eyes angrily. Allura had mistaken the tears in her eyes for simple reflections of the firelight; she hadn’t realized how close Kima had been to breaking down. She watched for a moment, transfixed, as Kima sobbed, curled up against the stone of the cavern. Then she shook herself and hurried over, skirting the fire to crouch at Kima’s side, unsure of what to do.

“I realized,” Kima gulped, “a second after you went down. I was too _stupid_ to realize it sooner, and you were gone, and I only just managed to get you back, but…” She paused briefly for breath, and then faced Allura squarely. “I can’t lose you, Allie. I _can’t_.”

It seemed she’d said her piece, for the next moment Allura found herself with her arms full of halfling. She felt a little like she was being crushed, and Kima was trembling with more than the tightness of their embrace, but it was still somehow incredibly reassuring.

“Well, then.” She held Kima close and rocked a little, humming a mindless tune as she waited for her to calm, turning over Kima’s words in her mind.

The confession—for roundabout or not, she felt confident that was what it had been—wasn’t what she would have expected, exactly. She didn’t feel surprised, though. Instead, she just felt…thoughtful. Some of that was probably shock, but underneath that was a strange feeling, working its way upward into her conscious mind.

Sometimes feelings, not dissimilar to arcane wisdom, took a little while to comprehend. Right now, Allura had the luxury of at least a few hours of time, so she let herself sit with the feelings. She stayed wrapped Kima’s frame, acquainting herself with the sturdy small bones and the thick, battle-hardened muscles wrapped over them and the way it all shifted slightly as she breathed.

It was an incongruous emotion, and one that, for better or worse, she wasn’t terribly accustomed to, so it took her a little while to place it. When she did, she was a little bit appalled at herself, and a little bit blackly amused, but the feeling, enduring through all of it, was unmistakably joy.

“I love you, too, Kima,” she said softly, as she realized the truth of it.

“You don’t have to humor me,” Kima muttered, starting to pull away.

Allura found Kima’s hands and held them in her own. “I’m not,” she said. “Truly. Kima, I might never have realized if you hadn’t said something, but…I realize now that I care for you as much more than as a friend. Indeed, I can’t imagine how I didn’t realize sooner. But with our allegiances so separate, and our duties to our respective—“

“ _Stop_ ,” Kima said firmly. Surprised, Allura stopped in mid-sentence. “You’re going to give me a headache. We can’t think about that kind of bullshit now! We’ve got a _dragon_ on our hands, remember? Let’s just stick with the basics. Just for now. Just till we get the rest of this worked out. Can you do that for me?”

_The basics_. It was Kima all over to take something as complicated as love and cut it down to its barest practicalities. Still, she could still make it out under the sarcastic tone; a hint of pleading, like Kima felt just as lost as Allura did, just as overwhelmed.

Allura laughed softly. “Very well, then. Thank you for saving me, Kima. I love you too. We’ll work it all out eventually.”


End file.
